Panasonic Develops Freeze-Ray Optical Disc-Based Data Archive System for Data Centers in Collaboration with Facebook

Optical Data Archiver helps ensure safe storage of valuable data over decades and reduced costs in Data Center

Mobilk - Panasonic Corporation today announced that it has developed freeze-ray, an Optical Disc-Based Data Archive System in collaboration

with Facebook. By collaborating with Facebook, Panasonic was able to design freezeray

to meet the growing demand for more efficient and sustainable ways to store and

access cold data -- infrequently or never accessed data stored for the long term -- in the

world’s data centers.

The freeze-ray solution reduces data center operating costs and energy use with strong

data integrity. This data archiving solution provides optimal cold storage for protecting

data integrity and reducing costs in data centers thanks to the special characteristics of

optical discs, including their longevity, immutability, backward compatibility, low power

consumption and tolerance to environmental changes. Both companies see the freezeray

data archiving solution, incorporating hundreds of optical discs, as a viable solution

for data centers to enable the industry to enjoy the benefits of the solution with greater

economies of scale.

Panasonic’s main contribution to the effort was its high-density optical technology, key

devices (optical discs, drives and related robotics) and library software to control the

system easily in the data center. Facebook collaborated by providing its unmatched

expertise in designing, deploying, managing and servicing storage systems in data

centers. In addition, Facebook provided extensive technical and real-world data center

feedback at every stage of the development. Both companies have been working on two

generations of the freeze-ray solution. Facebook is deploying the first-generation 100

GB Blu-ray Disc-based archive system into its data centers now, and expects

deployment of the second-generation 300GB Archival Disc-based archive system later in

2016.

“As Facebook continues to grow, we needed to address some of our fundamental

engineering challenges with an efficient, low-cost and sustainable solution that matches

our speed and exabyte-scale of data,” said Jason Taylor, PhD, VP of Infrastructure,

Facebook. "We e seeing exponential growth in the number of photos and videos being

uploaded to Facebook, and the work we’ve done with Panasonic is exciting because

optical storage introduces a medium that is immutable, which helps ensure that people

have long-term access to their digital memories.”

“Panasonic is delighted by the opportunity to collaborate with Facebook, with its strong

position and influence in the data storage market and expertise necessary to develop the

optical data archiver in validation with actual data center environments,” said Yasuji

Enokido, President of Panasonic’s AVC Networks Company. “With this data archiver, we

expect the industry will be able to enjoy the benefits of the optical technology that

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Panasonic Corporation of North America

www.panasonic.com

Panasonic has been refining over the past 30 years both in the consumer market and

B2B applications.“

Both companies plan to continue to collaborate in the study of and eventual

development of next- generation systems utilizing higher densities of 500 GB-and oneterabyte

Archival Discs to realize a multi petabyte cold storage archive system that will

provide even greater benefits to the data center industry.